


Centrifugal force

by Obotligtnyfiken



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s04e01 The Six Thatchers, Ficlet, Introspection, Pain, Self-Sacrifice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-15 18:15:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12326274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Obotligtnyfiken/pseuds/Obotligtnyfiken
Summary: Desperate, Sherlock turns to John's old therapist Ella when John turns him away after Mary's death. She gives him an assignment: find a word or a phrase that describes his relationship with John. It turns out to be one of the hardest things Sherlock had ever done.





	Centrifugal force

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wetislandinthenorthatlantic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wetislandinthenorthatlantic/gifts).



Sherlock gritted his teeth and summoned all his mental discipline. He hated thinking about feelings and relationships. They were illogical and confusing. He had learned early on that it was infinitely simpler to just ignore them. A lifetime of avoidance and reflexive arrogance had taught his brain circuits to skip over any emotional content - unless it was connected to a case, of course. Now that he had decided to turn his deductive powers to the relationship between him and John, he was finding it surprisingly difficult to keep his thoughts on track.

Trying - and failing - to deal with his widowed best friend, had made him desperate enough to contact Ella, John's old therapist. They had met for a first, awkward meeting the day before yesterday. She had asked him why he felt the need to “do something about John.” Sherlock thought the question stupid beyond measure, but when he couldn't find a way to answer it, she had given him an assignment: find a word or a phrase that describes his relationship with John. It was turning out to be one of the hardest things he had ever done.

He had spent the better part of the morning lying in his thinking pose on the couch at 221 B, but the place was too full of distracting memories. Instead, he had taken off in a huff, coat billowing behind him. He had intended to wander the streets of London, but after an hour he found himself back at Regents Park. He was now within spitting distance of Baker street, the place he had tried to escape. He gave up and sat down on a bench overlooking a lawn where families were lapping up the tentative warmth of the autumn sun.

This really shouldn't be difficult. They had known each other for less than six years, four if you didn't count his years away after The Fall, but they had only lived together for a little more than 18 months. This was not too much evidence to analyse. Rather, it ought to be an embarrassingly easy task. He decided to start with the timeline.

First, they moved in together. John started dating. Then Moriarty started playing his game, the most wonderfully distracting game of all time. It could have ended with a bang but it didn't. The Woman appeared and everything got a bit weird. They got scared by The Hound and everything got even weirder. And then, The Final Game that did end with a bang, Moriarty's shot to his own head that forced Sherlock to give up his life to save John's. In the end, he had only been required to give his life up metaphorically, but as he prepared for the jump and for his long slog to clear up Moriarty’s network, surviving had always seemed like the least likely outcome.

So, that was the first of three parts. The second part was The Fall, and what came after. The dirt, the killings, the almost dying. He really had been lucky too many times. He was probably out of lives now, like a cat who had fallen eight times. But what had gotten to him during those years away was not the grime and the danger. Instead he had found himself daydreaming about Baker Street and about John, wishing for his companionship even when the task at hand was better suited for a one man job. There was probably something in that thought that Ella would want him to put into words, but the sense of it eluded him as soon as he tried to focus on it. He sighed and moved on.

The third part had been the Mary period. Her name felt like gravel in his mouth, hard and oily and unpleasant. In the beginning, her presence had made life easier. She had pushed John back to him and not only allowed John to come along on cases, but actively encouraged him to do so.

Then she shot him. He pretended to be unaffected by the experience, brushing concern off with reassurances of his clean bill of health from the doctors, but the truth of it was that it still bothered him. He couldn't shake the feeling of something hard lodged in his chest, as if the bullet was still there, stuck between his lower ribs and his internal organs. It hurt at the oddest times and he had noticed himself avoiding deep breaths, in case his ribs would snag on some scar tissue and make him almost double over with pain.

It wasn't just the pain, though. Somehow, Mary had changed him, even before she pulled the gun. She made him feel like a stupid schoolboy and then laughed at him for it. It was uncanny, the way she knew that she had hit the mark even when he managed to keep his face completely impassive. It was as if she had a secret file on him that she used to find his weak spots, so sure of her accuracy that she didn't even need to see him react to know what worked.

He had struggled so hard to get over the shooting, to fix things for John, to never let him know the price that had been paid for his and Mary's happiness. And then she had to go and throw herself in front of the bullet that was meant for him, the one bullet that he finally, definitely deserved. He almost felt nauseous thinking about it. He had made his peace with his mission to make John's life a long and happy one, at any cost. Two times, he had willfully sacrificed his own life to that end, only to be miraculously saved. Then, the third time, when there was no plan, no sacrifice, nothing but his own stupid arrogance and flamboyance, she stole the bullet that was supposed to end him. And in doing so, she not only stole his death, she also stole his purpose in life and the very core of his being: John. Thinking about Mary was like sinking into a pit of lava, hot with shame and anger at her and at himself. He didn't even know which was which, he couldn't separate the twirling emotions from each other, he only knew that his heart was beating fast and he had to struggle to keep his breaths even.

But he wasn't supposed to think about Mary today, he was supposed to think about John. His mind’s deflections were really starting to border on the absurd. If his memories of Mary were like lava, his relationship with John seemed to be an active volcano, too hot to touch and ready to spew him out if he tried. Sherlock’s eyes felt gritty, as if he had forgotten to blink. He closed them slowly and felt the relief of tears rushing from the lacrimal glands, but then he had to snap them open to stop the tears from overflowing. He blinked desperately and looked around for something to focus them on for a while.

Two children from the picnicking families on the lawn had found each other and started playing tag in front of him. It had always seemed strange to him, the way other children migrated towards each other and started playing as if they had known each other for years.

The two young girls reminded him of himself and John: one taller with dark curls and one shorter, blonde and wearing a cable knitted jumper. He felt stupid for making such a banal reference. That's what thinking about relationships gets you.

The girls started running around each other, closer and closer as their circles got smaller. Predictably, it ended with the shorter one bumping her forehead into the taller one’s chin, both of them howling in pain. Two parents rushed up, kissed the bruises better and told them to take it easy. When the adults had sat down, the kids were soon at it again, starting the circling once more. One of the mothers rushed back up, grabbed the smaller girl and whispered something in her ear. As she returned to the others, Sherlock heard her say something to the others about learning from one's mistakes. Sherlock thought she might as well have been saying it to him, but he felt unclear about what he ought to do with himself instead — just like the two children who were now standing uncertainly next to each other.

The shorter one reached out for the other’s hand and started circling for the third time. Now, the two bodies were kept at arm's length. The introduction of stretched out arms, a restraint in their motion, changed their dynamic so that they started leaning away instead of bumping into each other. They circled faster and faster, twirling away over the grass and laughing to the sky. They looked like they felt closer than ever, when they really were about to break apart. As they spun themselves towards collapse, their hands whitened as they desperately tried to keep their grip on each other.

Sherlock felt the familiar twinge under his rib cage and his hand jerked as he stopped himself from rubbing his chest. There was something deeply unsettling with the scene in front of him, a feeling of impending doom that made him long desperately for the old days, working cases with John in their flat while the scent of Mrs Hudson’s scones wafted up from her kitchen.

Sherlock desperately tried to find something to distract himself, something stable and tangential. _The centrifugal force is a fictitious force that describes the acceleration of an object's motion compared to a non-accelerating frame_ , his mind unhelpfully supplied. Useless! The centrifugal force is not even a force! He tried to get upset over this misnomer that had bothered him so much as a child, but his heart wasn't in it. He gave up again, as he had done so many times today, and stared at the spinning mass of giggling children.

The two girls finally, but still quite suddenly, lost their grip and flew apart. Sherlock gasped and hunched over in pain, as if the force of their fall had ripped something inside of his chest. The tears that he had tried to stop from falling were now running down his face and he stumbled to his feet, wrapping his coat around himself as decisively as he could manage. He decided to leave the tears to fall as they wished and hid his wet cheeks behind his turned up collar. Wiping them away would only draw attention to them, and make his eyes unnecessarily red. Leaving the crying children to their parent's care, he strode away towards home, towards safety.

In the gloom of the hallway of 221 B Baker street, Sherlock leaned his back against the wall, groaning in pain as his ribs moved. This was the wall where he and John had once stood laughing, the night he had waited triumphantly for the arrival of Angelo bearing John's cane. Back then, they had been circling each other like the two girls did, bumping and bumping against each other until they both were bruised and hurting. When he returned, the introduction of Mary had seemed like a blessing in disguise, a restraint keeping them a bit apart to avoid the bumps and the bruises. He had thought that the distance would make them settle into something stable, but that had been a mirage. Having Mary between them had only served to hide the fact that they were still circling, still spinning faster and faster around each other. When Mary died, they stumbled away from each other, collapsing in the mud, like the children whose cries he imagined that he could still hear through the din of the traffic and the thick door of 221 B.

Sherlock closed his eyes once more and leaned his head back against the patterned wallpaper. He rolled his head to the right, feeling the painful pull of tense tendons all the way down to his waist. He was pretending that John was still there beside him, laughing, exhausted from running after Sherlock through London. “We were spinning faster and faster around each other until we lost our grip,” he whispered. The cramping muscles in his chest started to relax from the stretch. He didn't know if that was the kind of answer that Ella was looking for, but it would have to do. His heart couldn't take more soul searching today.


End file.
